Tough Guys Don't Dance by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online Page A

by and by.
    Now he pushed his chair straight back with military rectitude and came out from behind his desk to draw up a chair near me. Then he stared thoughtfully into my eyes. Like a General. He would have seemed a total prick if somewhere along the way he had not been implanted with the idea that compassion also belonged to the working police officer’s kit. The first thing he said, for instance, was “How is Patty Lareine? Have you heard from her?”
    â€œNo,” I said. Of course, by this one small remark he wiped out my hard-held stance as a journalist.
    â€œI wouldn’t get into it,” he said, “but I swear I saw her last night.”
    â€œWhere?”
    â€œAt the West End. Near the breakwater.”
    That was not far from The Widow’s Walk. “It’s interesting,” I said, “to hear she’s back intown, but I know nothing of that.” I lit a cigarette. My pulse had gone off on a race.
    â€œIt was just a glimpse of a blonde at the end range of my high beams. Three hundred yards, probably. I could be wrong.” His manner said he was right.
    Now he took out a cheroot and lit it, exhaling the smoke with panache enough for an old macho commercial.
    â€œYour wife,” he said, “is one attractive lady.”
    â€œThank you.”
    On one of our drunken evenings this August past, in a week when we had in-the-water-at-dawn parties every night (Mr. Black already casing my home) we had made the acquaintance of Regency. Via a complaint about the noise. Alvin responded personally. I am sure he had heard of our parties.
    Patty charmed him to the puttees. She told everyone—drunks, freaks, male and female models, half-nudes and premature Halloween types in costume—that she was turning down the stereo in Chief Regency’s honor. Then she jibed at the sense of duty that restrained his hand from taking a glass. “Alvin Luther Regency,” she said. “That’s a hell of a name. You got to live up to it, boy.”
    He grinned like a Medal of Honor winner being commemoratorially kissed by Elizabeth Taylor.
    â€œHow did you ever get a name like Alvin Luther in Massachusetts? That’s a Minnesota name,” she said.
    â€œWell,” he said, “my paternal grandfather is from Minnesota.”
    â€œWhat did I tell you? Don’t argue with Patty Lareine.” She promptly invited him to the party we would be giving the following night. He came after duty. At the end, he told me at the door that he had had a fine time.
    We started a conversation. He said he still kept his house in Barnstable and (Barnstable being fifty miles away) I asked if he didn’t feel a bit out of place working here in all the melee of the summer frenzy. (Provincetown is the only town I know where you can ask such a question of the police.)
    â€œNo,” he said, “I asked for this job. I wanted it.”
    â€œWhy?” I asked. I’d heard rumors he was a narc.
    He cut that off. “Well, they call Provincetown the Wild West of the East,” he said, and gave his whinny.
    After that, when we had a party, he’d drop in for a few minutes. If it continued from one night through to the next, we’d see him again. If it was after duty, he would have a drink, talk quietly to a couple of people, and leave. Just once did he give a clue—it was only after Labor Day—that he had taken on some booze. At the door he kissed Patty Lareine and shook hands formally with me. Then he said, “I worry about you.”
    â€œWhy?” I did not like his eyes. He had the kind of warmth, when liking you, that reminds one most certainly of granite after it has beenheated by the sun—the warmth is truly there, the rock likes you—but the eyes were two steel bolts drilled into the rock. “People have told me,” he said, “that you have a great deal of potential.”
    Nobody would phrase things that way in Provincetown.